The Justice System Is Slowly Coming For Parents

The shooter up in Madison, Wisconsin this week — which had a low body count, so sadly no one will remember this shooting in two months — was named Natalie Rupnow, but apparently went by the name “Samantha.” I am not sure what is happening there. There are varying troll reports that she was trans or had trans ideology, but that does not seem to be true (and, in fact, is worrying that “This person is trans!” is the first place that half of X users go).

The book on Rupnow from afar is almost too perfect for a school shooter: isolated female (the female part is admittedly rare), liked the Columbine shooters, wore the same shirts as them (an obscure German band), was chronically-online enough that she knew terms like “moids” and “foids” for the manifesto we’re linking to her, had a tough home life, her dad tried to connect with her via a shooting club, etc. All the clues were there. We just didn’t piece it all together before three people died. This is very common narrative.

Here’s a general breakdown of the family tumult.

Seems like Natalie was born in 2009, and her parents got married in 2011. Nice. But then they divorced, remarried, divorced again, remarried, and I believe had just semi-recently divorced a third time. She was predominantly living with her dad, or so it’s been reported. That would lead me to believe (although this is not fact) that the mom is some type of mess, because most judges side with women on custodial arrangements. It would seem to say “substance abuse” on the mom side, but who knows? If the writing attributed to the shooter is correct (I.e. if she actually wrote it), she apparently despised her mom. Some of this is tracking. In fact, this is kind of a similar backstory to Colt Gray, a school shooter in Georgia.

In the last five years, the main thing that has changed on these cases is that now we sometimes go after the parents. The Crumbley case in Michigan was the bellwether for this. Ethan Crumbley shot up a school, killing four-five I believe, and his parents also got sentences of 20+ years. Some people cheered this, as you logically would think parents are at least partially responsible for the moral upbringing of their children and their subsequent access to firearms. Then, of course, some parents went nuts about it — and typically those parents are the ones that realize “Oh God my kid is kinda sullen and if he/she does something, I don’t want to also go to jail.” If you openly are talking about “law enforcement overreach” for bad parenting, you pretty much just admitted you’re not a good parent yourself, but we gloss over that narrative.

So now the question is: will Rupnow’s parents get prosecuted?

The likely answer is no. Wisconsin and Michigan are different places, and the Crumbley case had slam-dunk elements of parental neglect of pleas from the school, as well as the mom banging her high school boyfriend in Target parking lots instead of parenting.

On Rupnow, it seems like the mom maybe wasn’t even that involved in week-over-week parenting, so it would be hard to get her on anything actually legal, aside from “You’re a shitty mom.” The dad might be “gettable” if he provided the gun(s) and knew there were mental health concerns, but the dad is also apparently fully cooperating. I think one of the issues in the Crumbley case is that the parents were assholes to authorities in the early-going, so the authorities were like: “Fuck this, let’s set some new precedent on these fools!” If Mr. Rupnow is cooperating, he might get spared a little bit here.

Because of the various confusions about what exactly parenting is and how it is legally defined, apart from obvious cases like child abuse, these types of deals are very hard to prosecute second-hand, I.e. getting the parents for the actions of the child, even a minor child in the care of the parents. I personally do not think we are going to get any prosecution here.

Now, we did indict Colt Gray’s father, who pleaded not guilty about a month ago.

I don’t know all the specifics of that case, but the big story circulating there is that Colt had a notebook with horrible imagery and thoughts, I.e. clear evidence of a decline, and Mr. Gray (Colin is his name) saw the notebook and had access to it, but also provided handguns. Having been a broken male myself for 44 years now, I can tell you that the father probably did the handgun thing as a “bonding” situation, much like Mr. Rupnow did with his daughter. It was a way to be “closer,” so in the limited arc of what fatherhood is or has become, it felt right. In order to continue feeling a biologically-natural connection, both of these dads ignored other things that were going on around the trips to the range or the woods. This is common, and in most cases it doesn’t result in mass violence, so dads are generally OK to keep doing it. But if your kid becomes the one kid, shouldn’t you get some time in the pen too? I personally think so, but I also realize the legal system is Byzantine in its complexity, and most of these cases won’t rise to the bar needed.

All that said, there’s a sheriff outside of Orlando who went viral a few months ago for basically telling people to sack up and parent their children.

We are kinda reaching that legal intersection now. Bad parenting is a drain on social services and police response (literally), and I think officials are fed up with the entitled bullshit and detachment in some areas, so they are turning prosecutorial power towards it. We will see if it continues in this direction. It’ll be interesting to see if Rupnow’s dad gets an indictment.